Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)
BOOK REVIEWS - Csaba Czeglédi: Endre Vázsonyi: Túl a Kacegárdán, Culmet-vidéki amerikai magyar szótár [Beyond Castle Garden: An American Hungarian Dictionary of the Calumet Region]. Edited and introduction by Miklós Kontra. A Magyarország-kutatás könyv-tára XV. Budapest: Teleki László Alapítvány, 1995. 242 pp
Why is the social aspect almost entirely excluded? Why is the world of the minimalist writer shrunk and forced into the shell of individual existence? "Minimalist literature minimalizes the self' (222) says Abádi Nagy using the same terms as Christopher Lash in The Minimal Self, proving, though, that the two terms are different. (Christopher Lash focuses on the phenomenon of the postmodern and draws his examples from among postmodernists, too.) However, Abádi Nagy admits, these two different uses of 'minimalism' are not that far away either, since "minimalist fiction, in a sense, is radically different from postmodern literature, while, in another sense, it is a product of the postmodern" (223). By this Abádi Nagy means that the shrunken, private worlds of the minimalists "can be viewed, in a very general sense, as the survival of postmodernist solipsism" (223). Abádi Nagy also accepts Lash's conclusion that "minimalism refers not just to a particular style in an endless succession of styles but to a widespread conviction that art can survive only by a drastic restriction of its field of vision" (224). The focus of the minimalist's camera is on the everyday life of the individual and the photo is taken with "a hair-raising verisimilitude" (225). The minimal self is reduced but not "devalued or defected, ... it is a personality of full social and psychological capacity, who, for some reason though, is not acting and behaving like one" (226). Abádi Nagy distinguishes four types of the reduced self. Two of them are produced in such a way that the reader cannot get a full picture of the character "because the writer prevents us from getting close to the full personality" (227); therefore,the reduced self is part of the minimalist author's strategy of portrayal and not a matter of the character's psychology. The two other types concern the nature of the characters. The first of the four types is the "man of after-effects," who is "the man after the trauma, after the crisis, after the decision" (227). The story/novel does not show a hero's way to a climax (in any sense) but it shows us "the vacuum, the apathy, the depression, the drifting of the hero, the self-narcosis" after the decisive event. The minimalist 189
